Amazon in AI fray with shopping tool

SEATTLE — Amazon entered the consumer chatbot fray last week, announcing a new artificial intelligence personal shopping assistant as the company races to catch up with other tech giants.

Customers can ask the tool, Rufus, product questions directly in the search bar of the company’s mobile app, Amazon said in a blog post. The AI will then provide answers in a conversational tone. The examples provided in the announcement included comparing different kinds of coffeemakers, recommendations for gifts and a follow-up question about the durability of running shoes.

Rufus was available starting Thursday to a “small subset of customers,” according to the post, and it will be rolled out to additional customers in the coming weeks. Amazon declined to provide more details about how many people will be part of the tool’s initial release.

Amazon allows its employees to take their dogs to work, and a dog named Rufus was one of the first to roam its offices in the company’s early days.

Amazon has been racing to shake off the perception that it is behind on the wave of AI tools unleashed more than a year ago, when the startup OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot.

If customers find Rufus helpful and popular, Amazon could shake up the business of searching for products — and control even more of the experience of shopping online.

Rufus “lets customers discover items in a very different way than they have been able to on e-commerce websites,” Andy Jassy, the company’s CEO, said. “It’s seamlessly integrated in the Amazon experience that customers are used to and love to be able to take action,” he said.

Microsoft and Google in the spring released chatbots and AI tools for their search engines, often highlighting shopping-related uses, and startups such as Perplexity have tried to redesign the search experience with AI in mind.

In the fall, Amazon released a corporate chatbot, called Q, for customers of its cloud computing division, and the company said it was working to make its Alexa voice assistant more conversational.

Even without generative AI, the Amazon search bar and the top results it produces are some of the most important placements in online retail. They have been the subject of antitrust inquiries, and the product ads in the search results are a foundation for the company’s booming advertising business.

Consumers are more than twice as likely to search first on Amazon versus other search engines when they are looking for a specific product to buy. But the e-commerce giant has long wanted to attract customers when they are still brainstorming and researching their options, when they typically turn to other sources, from TikTok to Google. Rufus is an attempt to bring customers into Amazon before they know precisely what they want.

“You will still be able to search in the search bar if you are very clear with what you want,” Brian Olsavsky, the company’s finance chief, said Thursday. “Rufus is more there to help you explore, and maybe if you have more questions.”

“It becomes more of a conversation with Amazon,” he said.

If Rufus takes off, Amazon could take ad sales away from Google and social media sites, where companies try to influence what customers decide to buy.

Amazon itself is a prolific advertiser on Google and social media apps, trying to bring in customers earlier in their shopping process.

Google, for its part, has tried for years to encroach on Amazon’s turf too, starting several shopping initiatives to attract independent sellers, with little success.